1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications and, more particularly, to methods and systems for managing mobile station location information.
2. Description of Related Art
Wireless telecommunications networks are increasingly using wireless location technologies to determine the locations of the mobile stations they serve. As a result, there is an increasing interest in developing location-based applications, i.e., applications that make use of mobile station location information. These location-based applications may simply track or monitor the locations of mobile stations, or they may provide information or services to mobile stations based on their locations. Such location-based applications may be internal to the wireless telecommunications network, or they may be third-party applications that obtain the locations of mobile stations from a location server or other entity in the wireless telecommunications network. For example, the Location Inter-operability Forum (LIF) has developed the “Mobile Location Protocol Specification” (version 3.0.0 published on Jun. 6, 2002) to define an access method that allows applications to query a wireless network for location information.
One difficulty with expanding the use of location-based applications is that the process of obtaining mobile station locations for the applications may consume substantial network resources. In particular, wireless telecommunications networks typically initiate location determinations in order to respond to requests for location information from location-based applications. Thus, as the number of location-based applications requesting location information increases, and the number of mobile stations being located increases, the load on the wireless telecommunications network may correspondingly increase substantially.
Accordingly, there is a need to obtain and provide mobile station location information more efficiently.